Citizen Limbaugh

It's an interesting profile in the NYT. 

Now, it's tempting to see a late-Citizen Kane pathos in this description of Rush's crib, post-third-failed-marriage:

There are five homes — all of them his — on the property. The big house is 24,000 square feet. Limbaugh lives there with a cat. He’s been married three times but has no children.

snip

The massive chandelier in the dining room, for example, is a replica of the one that hung in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in New York. The gleaming cherry-wood floors are dotted with hand-woven oriental carpets. A life-size oil portrait of El Rushbo, as he often calls himself on the air, hangs on the wall of the main staircase.

snip

His salon, he told me, is meant to suggest Versailles. His main guest suite, which I did not personally inspect, was designed as an exact replica of the presidential suite of the George V Hotel in Paris.

Limbaugh is especially proud of his two-story library, which is a scaled-down version of the library at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. Cherubs dance on the ceiling, leatherbound collections line the bookshelves and the wood-paneled walls were once “an acre of mahogany.”

A fastidious man, Limbaugh has a keen eye for domestic detail. His staff lights fragrant candles throughout the house to greet his arrival from work each day. Limbaugh led me into his private humidor, selected two La Flor Dominicana Double Ligero Chisel stogies for us to smoke and seated me at an onyx-and-marble table in the study. The room opens onto a patio, a putting green and a beach. On the table was a brochure for Limbaugh’s newest airplane, a Gulfstream G550. It cost him, he told me, $54 million.

Tempting, but not really the case.  He clearly loves performing, loves the acclaim of his tribe, loves showing his family what a big shot he is, and loves being filthy rich.

No schadenfroid here.  This great enemy of all our ideals is one of the happy winners in life, if a bit of a case of arrested development (the reporter really gets a rise out of him when mentioning Savage, O'Rielly and especially Hannity).

Nothing to say but: sigh.